He Shot Me.

Our very first stim shot was last night, and I’m happy to report, it was successful.


There is good news and bad news.


The good news is the scary looking, dart-like needle that I received about a million of, is NOT used to inject the meds into me. It is a mixing needle. While the injection needle is nothing to laugh at, it’s much thinner and less dart like. This was very good news. As you can see, it’s rather intimidating. The bad news is…they hurt like hell! I have a pretty high pain tolerance (ask anyone that knows me that and they’ll say the opposite, but just because I complain a lot doesn’t mean I don’t have a tolerance. I’m just whiny, that’s all) and I winced through the whole thing. Chris did his job just fine, it’s the actual meds that hurt. Sting, to be exact. Sting like a motherfucker to be completely honest.

It appeared to be any other Thursday night. But we knew the injection was looming. You could see it in our eyes, hear it in our nervous laughter. We had a job to do. My window of injections is 6-9pm (since my morning injection window is 7:30-10:30am, I thought I’d mix it up a little. I’m wacky like that) so I decided to just get it over with. Right after Rachel Ray finished her 30 Minute Meal, I was at the kitchen table with my science experiment, the instructions from our clinic and of course, the paper work that came with all the drugs. It’s quite involved. I have felt I deserve my own white lab coat with my name monogrammed on the front for so long, and now I really, truly feel I’ve earned it. We received great instructions from our clinic and it seemed pretty easy. Well, if you consider mixing powder vials with sodium chloride and then adding the FSH medication into that vial, withdrawing all of that out into the mixing syringe (make sure you get it all! There is about $300 of meds in there, it ALL needs to get in your ass!) and changing needles easy, then it was easy. We went step by step, slowly, making sure we didn’t make any mistakes. Did I mention our clinic said, “The first 3 days of stims are the most important, so don’t mess up! No pressure!”? We read each step out loud in that slow, drawn out way you do when you’re concentrating, doing, and reading at the same time. “Noooowww, inject the soodiummmm chloride into the powder viallllll….mmmmkkkkkkkk”. Finally, it was all mixed and ready to go. Chris took the dart needle off the syringe and replaced it with the one that looks like, well, a needle. I took my position, and braced for the shot. He then walked me through each step, “OK, I’m going to start” and did a great job starting the injection, pulling it out a little to make sure there was no blood (“No blood!” “Ok, good!”) and then proceeding with injecting all the meds. Then the stinging began.

Since they are intramuscular, the injection site is sore for a couple days. I clearly remember this from all my trigger shots in the last year. It’s sore. It hurts. And I get to have these shots every day for about 10 days, THEN we move on to the even more atrocious progesterone in oil shots for another two weeks. Basically my ass is getting brutalised for a month.

While I’m open about IVF in my personal life, I’m not in my professional life with the exception of my boss. So while I limp around the office because my ass hurts, I have to lie and say it’s a pulled muscle instead of the truth. They can’t handle the truth. “Oh, it’s nothing, my husband shot nun pee into my ass last night and it’s a little sore now.”

You know, I have to giggle at the moms that only have “I was in labor for 24 hours with you!” to their children. We have so much more to make them feel guilty about. “Your father had to shoot me in the ass for weeks!” is a good start. I’m not sure how or if we’ll even approach the money aspect. Telling them we spent $12,000 (if this one works, otherwise that amount goes disgustingly higher) to even conceive him/her would probably result in some ungrateful, whiny response about that must be why they don’t have the coolest clothes or best toys.

I can’t wait.